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Products of Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) eG (4)

The rationale to found the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) was born at the beginning of the 2000s when the use of Open Source software in industrial products was becoming more and more popular. The background are the challenges that this new kind of software brings along: the community-based development and a complete new type of licensing.

In contrast to proprietary software, Open Source software is delivered together with the source code. Anything else is in the hands of the users, that means that the users have to take care of the software quality, extensions and special software requirements of the industry have to be provided, and the software licensing has to be done in a compliant way. Last but not least, possible requirements with regard to safety certification have to be taken into account. Since the source code has to be disclosed anyway, it would economically not make sense to let every company take care of these extra tasks, but rather do this work in a community in the same way as the software itself is development. OSADL is such a community for the machine, machine tool and automation industry and, in principle for everyone who develops and distributes embedded systems. In short, industrial companies bundle forces in OSADL, thus ensuring that Open Source software and especially Linux will be available also in the future in the required quality and with the necessary legal compliance.

Important OSADL projects refer to all aspects of using Open Source software and particularly Linux in industrial products. The OSADL service range includes quality assurance of Open Source components and provision of industry-specific extensions. As far as license compliance is concerned, OSADL offers general legal support with regard to Open Source license issues by OSADL's General Counsel, review of license compliance through standardized audits, special scanning procedures and industry-specific business process consulting as well as access to the OSADL legal knowledge and FAQ database, checklists and legal assessments. Furthermore, OSADL members profit from seminars, special events and workshops. Last but not least, OSADL provides a platform for its members to present their products and to network with other members of the community.

You can find more detailed information to the special OSADL products in the “Product” section:

Real-time capabilities of the Linux kernel

Project: Real-time network (OPC UA over TSN)

License Compliance Audit (LCA) and legal know-how database

Documents for certification of the Linux kernel according to SIL2 (SIL2LinuxMP)

Companies from all over the world may become OSADL member and benefit from its services. OSADL is a registered cooperative, its now 72 regular members belong to the following industries: machine builders, automation hardware, automation software, semiconductor manufacturers, Open Source service providers and user associations. Apart from the regular membership, large corporations may also join OSADL as Associate Member Bronze/Silver/Gold. Newly founded individual companies may join OSADL as Associate Member Base Level, and more than 25 universities and high schools from all over the world contribute scientific and technical knowledge to OSADL as Academic Members

Documents for certification of the Linux kernel according to SIL2 (SIL2LinuxMP)

After Linux may be equipped with real-time capabilities, there is a second hurdle that has to be taken in order to make Linux a general-purpose operating system for embedded systems of all types: certification for its use in a safety-critical environment.

The difficulties of such a certification are that, due to its development model, Open Source software per se can not be considered as conformantly developed; in consequence, new certifications procedures have to be developed. In a first step, two completely different tasks have to be completed. 1. The provision and validation of suitable certification processes and 2. the application of these processes to individual embedded systems. The main advantage of this approach in two steps is that the first step only has to be taken once, as the developed processes can be reused later on. This exactly is the goal of the OSADL SIL2LinuxMP project. Participants in this project can either have their systems certified or access the processes and apply them in own certifications of Linux-based embedded systems.

In case you would like to get more information, please write to safety@osadl.org.

License Compliance Audit (LCA) and legal knowledge database

The awareness how to deal with Open Source licenses and what steps a company should take to be license compliant took some time to evolve. This is important, among others, because license compliance is part of company compliance and failure to comply may entail serious consequences for the management. In close collaboration with specialized attorneys OSADL offers the corresponding know-how and best practices from every day's routine. Furthermore, OSADL has developed a formal certification procedure, the so-called OSADL License Compliance Audit (LCA). This audit helps companies distribute Linux in a compliant way and mark their products accordingly. In case gaps are detected during the audit, OSADL helps twice:

OSADL makes specific proposals to close these gaps and

OSADL defines clear concepts how to optimize the affected processes.

If the audit is successful, the client is issued a certificate along with the report, and the audited product can be marked with the LCA hallmark.

In case a company needs to repeatedly check its products for license compliance, OSADL offers the more process-oriented Supplier License Compliance Audit (SLCA). The SLCA qualifies the processes of the company with respect to the fulfillment of the Open Source software license requirements.

Project: Real-time network (OPC UA over TSN)

The Ethernet standard and the future evolution of this base communication layer represents today an important standard of interoperable network communication - in fact from sensor via control system up to the server. According to common understanding, this will remain so without doubt in the near and even less near future. To the contrary, there are many doubts that the upper communication layers will remain as they are now, since the required interoperability makes it highly desirable that only a single protocol be used - instead of the more than 50 different ones none of which has reached more than 50 percent market share. In addition, communication methods are needed that have real-time capabilities and require much less resources than today which is an important prerequisite to serve the expected large number of future nodes. The above doubts were obviously more than justified; 21 well-known automation companies that together cover more than 95 percent of the market agreed on SPS IPC Drives 2018 to create a uniform real-time communication system based on OPC UA with Publish / Subscriber Extensions (PubSub) and Time Sensitive Network (TSN). And it was obvious to delegate the task and responsibility to the OPC Foundation to organize standardization and implementation of the new globally binding protocol.

In addition to the standardization of OPC UA/TSN, it is also necessary to provide freely accessible and fully usable software implementations in order to achieve a general acceptance of the methods. This can best be achieved by using an Open Source license that allows to be linked to proprietary applications. Since this was not the case, a first version of an Open Source implementation of OPC UA was launched without PubSub and TSN in the context of the project "open62541". Further development including the provision of PubSub, and initial tests with TSN then took place in an OSADL community project. The project partners involved a team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, Systems Engineering and Image Evaluation (Fraunhofer IOSB) and the India-based software integrator and consultant Kalycito Infotech. After completing this project phase, OPC UA with PubSub was available for the first time under an Open Source license suitable for industrial products. However, at least the following components were still missing:

1. Configuration of TSN endpoints

2. Generic interface to TSN

3. Improvement of the real-time capabilities

4. Support for the certification of individual devices

5. Extension by a security layer

In order to realize the development activity of these components as part of a community process, a new Letter of Intent for project phase 2 is now available. When the funding threshold mentioned in this Letter of Intent is reached, the project starts; it is hoped that this will be the case before the first day of embedded world 2019. This Letter of Intent is available to interested companies at the following download link:

Real-time capabilities of the Linux kernel and quality assessment and assurance in the OSADL QA Farm

Not too long ago even in the Open Source community there was a debate going on whether a general purpose kernel such as Linux could be converted into a real-time kernel or not. Meanwhile it has become clear and is generally accepted, that this is, in fact, possible and that such an adapted Linux kernel is suitable in a wide variety of industrial real-time applications. To convert the Linux kernel into a real-time kernel was, among others, an important rationale when founding OSADL. Since January 2016, the Linux Foundation has been taking care of coordinating the real-time development and raising funds for it (Linux Foundation RTL Project). OSADL is contributing considerably to this project as a Member and, as such, representing the automation industry in the consortium.

The Linux kernel developers have a strong need for feedback of users of the respective industrial sectors, in order to not only guarantee the high quality of the Linux kernel in general, but also with regard to the sector-specific requirements. As far as the automation industry, mechanical engineering and embedded systems are concerned, OSADL has taken over this task and is running a corresponding test center - the so-called "OSADL QA Farm". In order to achieve the widest possible range of realistic scenarios, OSADL carries out various continuous 24/7 measurements on more than 160 different types of embedded systems in the QA Farm. An important part of these measurements is the determination of the real-time capability of the systems and their runtime stability.